A Blog Dedicated to Media Consumption and Creation

ON COMMENTARY

Some famous rich person once said about investors: “When the tide goes out, yuo find out who was swimming naked.” In other words, it’s easy to hide your failures and fuckups when times are good — there’s always somebody willing to give you a loan, or buy something you have to sell at a premium price, or invest into the crackpot idea that you are peddling. When times get tough, those people get stingy, and your shourtcomings become apparent. Your ill-conceived, badly-run business really goes bankrupt, your house/car/flatscreen get reposessed, etc. We’re seeing a bit of that now.

The same rule applies in public discourse as in business. To wit: there are a lot of people out there who make their living by telling you how things really are, by talking on television, writing in the newspaper, speaking into the Congressional record. Many — I’ll say most of these people — do not know what they are talking about. Just because someone has a chyron under his image reading “expert” does not really mean anything. He is probably just talking out of his ass. Her too.

For quite a while now, we’ve been in the equivalent of some really good times for our public discoursers. Talk about whatever you want — supply-side economics, vast conspiracies of against religion, welfare queens, the Rapture — and somebody would take you seriously. If you were really forceful and charismatic, you might even get a nationally syndicated talk show. And if you were ever really, verifiably, unquestionably wrong about something, you could probably just distract people by spouting even more bullshit on a different topic and waiting for the general public to forget. We are a nation of amnesiacs, after all. (And we really seem to care about displaying the Ten Commandments, for some reason.)

But hard times have come for the bullshitters as well. Faced with the prospect of real losses in the market, seniors not being able to retire, of families losing the house and the health insurance, it isn’t enough to have the best line. Suddenly, even if it is difficult to tell who was right all this time, there are some clear examples of people who were wrong. (Jim Cramer: wrong.)

My own opinion is that the current situation is so complicated that no one knows what is going on. Even the most astute and connected observers are just that: observers. If anyone tells you they know what is going on, punch them in the throat. If that it not possible, change the channel.